THE LOWLY NEWSPAPERMAN: Ideologically blinkered SACP needs to drop socialist ‘isms’ to win over ANC-weary voters

While communists (and those who preferred to define themselves as socialists) were in deep depression as the Soviet Union and its satellite states collapsed like dominoes, South Africa’s Joe Slovo stepped forth to offer them a bit of therapy and a way forward for their ideology.

Slovo’s paper, titled “Has Socialism failed?”, excited the left-leaning world. This was a time of triumphalism in the West, with leaders crowing about their role in bringing down communism and right-leaning intellectuals pronouncing on capitalism’s victory over what they termed the evil system.

US President George HW Bush, who was in the White House for four years from 1989 as communist governments fell, gloated that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of a long struggle against communism and the threat it posed, resulting in a victory for democracy and freedom, while his British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, bragged that “free enterprise overwhelmed socialism”.

In 1992, American academic Francis Fukuyama wrote a book that expanded on an essay he had written in 1989 while working for the US State Department. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama stated that the fall of the Soviet Bloc was “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

Socialist adherents moped. Until Slovo stepped forward and assured him that not all was lost. With communist and socialist parties around the world in disarray, the then SACP general secretary’s paper offered a critique of what had gone wrong. Socialism had not failed, Slovo argued; it had just been badly implemented.

Communist parties had rejected multiparty democracy and instead embraced tyranny (“socialism without democracy”, as he called it), adopted the cult of personality that allowed Joseph Stalin and other dictators to emerge, crushed internal dissent within parties, showed intolerance of other voices in society and alienated populations through the suppressive top-down approach to governance.

Slovo posited that communists’ “claim to represent the historic aspirations of the workers does not give us an absolute right to lead them or to exercise control over society as a whole in their name, and argued that “the way forward is through thorough-going democratic socialism; a way which can only be charted by a party which wins its support through democratic persuasion and ideological contest and not, as has too often happened up to now, by a claim of right”.

In short, the political system that executed the mission was wrong. Not the economic underpinnings of that political order.

Slovo’s intervention spawned animated conversation, both critical and welcoming, in global left circles. The defeatism was turned into a conversation about how to rebuild from the ashes.

A byproduct of the Slovo discussion was that the SACP, one of the few communist parties operating in an environment where the ideology was still seen by many as a viable alternative to the capitalist exploitation that had sustained apartheid, became a lodestar for the global left.

Its leaders, including Slovo and his successor Chris Hani, were wildly popular. The party’s rallies were always packed. Because both allies’ constitutions allowed for dual membership, many ANC members joined the SACP. Cosatu shop stewards flocked to the SACP. It was cool to be a communist. The late Sunday Times editor Ken Owen would describe the SACP as “the last functioning orthodox Marxist-Leninist party in the world” outside of Cuba.

Now the SACP, no longer content with being the ANC’s junior partner in the Tripartite Alliance, has entered the electoral ring. It is taking the fight to the ANC and other political parties, offering voters a promise of a socialist future.

The SACP is telling South Africans to choose it over others because it has a compass to a more equal society where wealth is commonly generated and equitably shared. This is a bold (some would say foolish) move for an organisation whose symbiotic relationship with the ANC and Cosatu has been one of its greatest strengths.

But it was an inevitable development, given the long-standing agitation within the party for this move. As the ANC settled in government and became more of an establishment party having to respond to real-world issues, the more communists felt alienated.

Epithets about the ANC turning neoliberal abounded as the government adopted market-friendly economic policies. The SACP experimented with fielding its own candidates during by-elections, with varying levels of success.

The dam wall eventually burst when the ANC chose the DA as its primary coalition partner in the national government after the 2024 general election and ignored the SACP’s proposals for the “reconfiguration” of the Tripartite Alliance’s power relations. The SACP would have preferred to get into bed with the corrupt MK party and the transactional EFF.

The question now is whether the SACP can put in a decent showing in November, an outing it sees as a dress rehearsal for a more aggressive tilt at political power in the 2029 general election. It is no doubt a risky move. It comes at a time when the SACP is no longer that cool brand to which so many flocked in those heady 1990s.

Over the past three decades, it has allowed its public image to be subsumed by the ANC. Its organisational capacity is at its weakest, as is that of Cosatu – the trade union partner whose shop stewards were a fertile source of membership and leadership recruitment.

Association with the ANC was once a boon, but the erstwhile governing party’s record of corruption is now a taint. So, given a choice between another party and the SACP, voters could opt for an alternative that does not carry the ANC’s taint.

But the SACP’s biggest drawback is likely to be its own ideological purism. Its recently released 2026 election manifesto is hardly different from those of most parties, addressing the issues that currently bedevil South Africa’s municipalities: water shortages, electricity outages, housing backlogs, rampant crime and unemployment.

Then, as if to differentiate itself, the SACP veers into socialist jargon. Just some of the choice lines:

“The NDR (National Democratic Revolution) is stuck. It is in a state of interregnum and has stalled because of a unilateral choice for a neoliberal economic trajectory, where effort does not yield expected outcomes because primitive accumulation and profit interests have replaced serving the people”; “Marxism teaches us to look beneath appearances and ask what lies beneath the surface of society; “Capitalism places production and the allocation of wealth under the domination of private accumulation”; “This is why the SACP speaks of socialism not as a distant abstraction but as a practical struggle over the conditions of everyday life.”

If the SACP is to make an impact on South Africa’s electoral scene over the next few years it will have to re-examine its public posture. It does not need to be ashamed of or hide its Marxist-Leninist leanings but it has to recognise that electability is the name of the game in politics. Voters don’t care about “isms”. They care about the issues that the SACP has correctly identified as blighting people’s lives.

It needs to learn from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose influence is surging in a nation that worships the god of money. The DSA’s successes include getting a Uganda-born Muslim elected as mayor of New York and stellar performances in primaries ahead of the country’s midterm elections in November.

DSA adherents are openly socialist in capitalist America but they do not beat their chests and proclaim their socialist credentials. They just speak the language of the people and answer to their basic needs.

There is definitely space for an independent SACP on the South African political scene but they need to drop the ideological blinkers. As Slovo said, their right to speak on behalf of the working class has to be earned through securing the support of the masses democratically. They will not earn that by just preaching socialism. DM